Re: debian-user list info and guidelines: spam
Hi John,
On Mon, Jan 25, 2021 at 01:03:07AM -0500, John Kaufmann wrote:
> Your post provides a hook to ask about a question that arises sporadically: Probably less than one a month I receive from Debian Listmaster Team <listmaster@lists.debian.org> a message "lists.debian.org has received bounces from you". Invariably it reads:
> >In the last seven days we've seen bounces for the following list:
> >* debian-user
> > 1 bounce out of <nn> mails in one day (<x>%, kick-score is 80%)
>
> First: How common is this occurrence for others?
Probably around the same frequency as you until I set my mail server
to never reject spammy mails from Debian lists but instead silently
discard them.
The thing is, this is about spam. The best practice when dealing
with a piece of mail that has been identified as so spammy that you
don't want to receive it is not to file it away in a spam folder,
but to reject it at SMTP time.
If it were directed to a spam folder then the sender believe it has
been delivered but the user may not look at it ever. At least with
an SMTP-time reject, the sending system knows that the mail has not
been safely sent. If it is a human sender than they can take
appropriate action if a mistake has been made.
Unfortunately Debian's listserv doesn't like it when you do this and
will eventually unsubscribe you because it sees so many errors with
the (spam) emails it tries to send you. At least as you say the
threshold is quite high and it would be very unlikely to send 80%
rejectable spam in one day, but I still found it annoying enough to
abandon the SMTP reject best practice policy for mails from Debian
lists.
You don't have that option, because you don't run your MTA. But the
people who run your MTA are doing the right thing by rejecting email
that they consider too spammy. So although it may be worth asking if
there's anything they can do, it's likely they won't want to do
anything differently there.
> I cannot currently post to the SOGo list because their spam
> filter (UCEPROTECT) claims that my ISP currently hosts 6
> spammers. In response, they block all mail from that ISP (called
> UCEPROTECT Level2 protection). Again, getting my ISP to care
> about this is an ongoing challenge.
Now this one is different. UCEPROTECT doesn't have a good reputation
amongst DNSBLs. They routinely list entire providers for a small
number of incidents and they require a payment to be removed.
I would call it extremely unwise to outright block email for
UCEPROTECT level 2 listing. I personally would not even score on
that. They will be rejecting a lot of legitimate email, not just
yours.
All you can do is try to persuade them to stop using UCEPROTECT
though.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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